The Dapper Diaz
In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
― Junot Díaz
Today I am a 56 year old academic who wrote only one good poem in his life and enjoyed torturing his smart young(er) wife by drinking too much in front of her and constantly spouting the lewdest Catullus he could pull from rapidly fraying synapses. Once, he refused to help friends bury a great white shark in the dead of night. Good friends. His only friends. He watched them, instead, swigging grand marnier from a flask on moonlit beach as they dug and sweated and pushed and heaved and finally buried their monster. I’m not a very good poet, he told his friends morosely when they collapsed next to him and begged him for the flask. We know, they said, but not unkindly. It was the last good time he ever had in his life. I don’t like being this man. He disturbs and disgusts me, especially when he his awful to his wife. But he is my necessary alcoholic academic, beacon. I will go and shower now and try and rinse him off until tonight, when I will revisit his condition with a glass of wine and a cat curled on my legs. I won’t let him ruin my weekend. Perhaps I should, Mr. Diaz, but I won’t. This post may come back to haunt me.
PB Rippey Writes 
Ah, crap. That’s a well written (and true!) paragraph. Indeed I often feel the need to be someone else to write a book. This is good inspiration for a blog post. Thanks for sharing!
That is a great quote, one I’ll be thinking of often in the coming week.
As long as it doesn’t mean I need to become a surfer…there be sharks in the water.
And who is the 56-year-old alcoholic dude? I give up.
Beth–virtual surfing is much safer. Dude is in adult novel, not kid’s novel, probably should have clarified. Ha! Or Whew.
I LOVE that quote! Thanks for taking the time to share it.
It is apt, isn’t it? And I think part of the reason why I’ve written so much this weekend, in between fixing meals, vacuuming, playing Candyland and Legos and finishing the 5th Season of Mad Men with my husband. Right on.